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Business News/ Opinion / Columns/  The thin line between joy and misery on family holidays
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The thin line between joy and misery on family holidays

People flee home without realizing that they’re carrying most of their home along on vacation

Photo: AFPPremium
Photo: AFP

Married people go to some of the most beautiful places on earth to fight. I once saw a couple, standing in a spectacular cove, arguing over something, after which the man flung his wallet on the beach and walked away; his wife, remarkably, picked it up, and went the other way. In Cinque Terre, a cluster of coastal villages in Italy, a man who had to carry two huge suitcases uphill and his wife, who had probably given the taxi driver the wrong address, said nasty things to each other in the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea. Later, on the main street, a woman dragged a suitcase, sobbing. No one knew why, but could guess. There is a certain trauma that can only be caused by the other sex. Often I have felt that a couple visiting a war memorial is war that has come to make fun of a memorial.

This April in South Goa, the quiet of a resort was shaken by a woman in a suite screaming at her husband. She was saying she had had enough, that he was useless, that she was going back home with the kids. The husband’s defence, if there was one, was not audible. The next day, she yelled again with new information. A few weeks ago, as a flight from Paris landed in Delhi, an angry woman told her husband, who was rocking an infant, that she is never travelling with the baby or him ever again. It was pure misery, she said. The husband rocked the baby harder, as if to remind her that he does not slacken on his domestic chores. Even in Antarctica, as a cruise-liner passed by giant icebergs, an old couple on the deck fought over a chore the man had failed to do that morning.

I have often considered starting a movement to ban people who have been married for over seven years from entering beautiful places for the same reason why toxic industries are banned in such paradises.

Yet, it is for them that the beautiful places wait and it is for them that the finest inventions of the travel industry exist. The lone leisure traveller exists, but is rarer and less precious than a family on vacation. Even though people spend a lot on themselves, when it comes to travel, they feel they are not worth it at all as individuals and splurge only when such an expense can be witnessed by their most powerful critics—their family.

In plain sight, it certainly does appear that people love family vacations. In fact, all life on earth appears to be sombre people waiting to go on a family vacation.

This summer, the urban Indian middle-class made passionate travel plans, having been restricted by the pandemic for two years. And for most Indians, probably most people in the world, a vacation means a family holiday. But do families really enjoy these? I do very much, but I am never surprised when I look around and see marriages and families falling apart on vacation. I never see so many distraught people back home and I almost never see miserable locals. Anywhere on earth, the most visibly unhappy people are families on vacation.

The objective of a vacation is to flee home, but then philosophically, spatially, spiritually and emotionally, a large part of home is the family. Thus, on a family vacation, people flee home without realizing that they are carrying most of their home along. In fact, when they were back home, they didn’t have to share so much time and space with each other. Everyone had their own rooms, routines, work and friends. But on a vacation, a family is thrown together. A family is many beautiful things, but it is also a fellowship of wounds and grouses. And when this fellowship is squeezed into a space smaller than home for long days, things can go wrong in memorable ways.

A middle-class Indian couple with an infant on a first world holiday will mostly suffer. Without the cheap labour of a maid and their mothers, they will be in shock. Everything that Europeans make look easy—like cycling or kayaking with infants strung somewhere—looks very difficult when Indians try to imitate it. Older children are not so much trouble beyond their whining about how bored they are, unaware that the vacation is too expensive to say stuff like this.

The other Indian demographic group that suffers on foreign vacations is of old parents who have been brought out of gratitude. You walk down, say, London or New York, and you would see an old couple from an Indian small town, looking dazed by the amount of walking they need to do, the hard work that is required to use the metro system, the extraordinary taxi fares as though the West defines hyperinflation, and the inedible food. Sometimes, there is no torture like the gratitude of your children.

Tourism is a recent invention, especially tourism for people who are not part of a royal family. For most of our history, people travelled on work or on pilgrimage, or because they had no choice. A whole family moving to another town to squeeze into a smaller home, for fun, is still a bit odd.

People who have experienced love, companionship or children, or are in the embrace of a home in other ways, find it hard to holiday alone. What the lone traveller in a beautiful place misses is context. Why are you here? That you are some place all by yourself because it is beautiful is not a convincing answer. It is not just that we need to share a moment. We also need to be witnessed. Without a witness to our day, we are anonymous. It is as though life does not take our memory of ourselves seriously; it needs another memory to confirm it. Human experience is a two-factor authentication of an event. From this arises the entire tourism industry, and a bit of strife.

Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’

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Published: 26 Jun 2022, 10:20 PM IST
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